Ray Kyooyung Ra - Core Response #2 (Week 4)

In the system of distribution and sponsorships television is confined to, how is the televised  female body negotiated? Particularly after reading Lipsitz’s and Lynn Spigel’s chapters, this was a question that persisted throughout my reading of the four texts, how influential commercial forces are in permitting specific representation of women on television.

The four texts that we read over the week attempt to locate television as an apparatus and content in various contexts such as the sociopolitical, domestic, or aesthetics. The representation of femininity, specifically, in relation to these contexts seemed to be a vein that ran through all of them. While Lipsitz and Spigel explores the televised female body and the family in macro-context such as that of a period generational transition within history or a relatively micro-context of the domestic space, I noticed that there didn’t seem to be much discussion on the direct role of commercial entities that would set the boundaries for how a woman could be portrayed in television. I would have been very interested in reading about how advertisers limited and influenced the roles or traits of the women  on television more in depth—not just on how the “fireless cooker” became the star of a Mama episode and how the narrative works to serve the advertiser’s commodity as Lipstiz extensively illustrates, but more on the direct, hard power of advertisers on female representation for television.

Content on television is heavily influenced by the advertisers: they are, after all, as suggested by the chapters we read, the entities that set the terms for a televised “flow”. Deborah Jaramillo discusses in RETHINKING TELEVISION: A Critical Symposium on the New Age of Episodic Narrative Storytelling the authority advertisers have in influencing televised content, that which overruled even institutional censorship, historically. The advertisers’ influence on content is readily observable in their absence: platforms such as HBO (“It’s not TV. It’s HBO”) or Netflix (proudly showcasing label categories such as ‘Featuring a Strong Female Lead’) that differentiated themselves with ‘progressive’, more ‘outrageous’ contents predicated this differentiation on lack of government and advertiser regulations. Having a subscriber model allowed these platforms more creative freedom, the freedom to cater their contents to the taste of the paying subscribers alone.

Keeping in mind that the audience from the earlier decades are underestimated in their capacity to perceive how women were ill-portrayed on television as well as taking into consideration the advertisers’ considerable presence in “flow”, you can’t help but admire the genius of writers Madelyn Pugh or Gertrude Berg in navigating the media environment then to work women on to the small screen. It is easy to criticize the things we see in shows like I Love Lucy as regressive and offensive—but writing a woman within the confined domestic space set by sociocultural expectations  as well as the advertisers’ conservatism would have been an excruciating ordeal. As Mellencamp quotes, the humor that allowed women such as Lucy and Gracie to strategically place themselves in such repressive conditions was “a rare and previous gift”, a small window of liberation contained within the discursive complexity that was television.